Cut to the chase

Australian researchers have developed a method for browsing and searching online video so internet users can cut to the chase.

Whether it's a sequence from a movie or an educational video with a handy lesson - imagine being able to link exactly to the most important moment or find it with a simple online search.

A CSIRO team has created web tools and an online language that could help integrate audio and video files with the web more closely than ever before.

Continuous Media Markup Language, or CMML, will allow producers to mark certain scenes or moments within their footage so they can be browsed easily.

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If embraced by the likes of Google or AltaVista, internet users will be able to search online audio and video just as they search web pages and images.

"Search engines need only to be made aware that there's another file format they can find and most will be able to understand it. So there's not a lot of work involved," says the CSIRO's Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, who with colleague Conrad Parker has been working on the CMML concept for almost two years.

One search could provide links deep into the middle of an online movie, playing at the exact moment where the key words are said. If parliament's Question Time footage was online, searchers could jump to exactly who said what, without having to watch an entire session.

"Every video, everything you see on TV, for example, has a structure - a beginning, middle and end, various scenes - and the people who made it know this structure," Pfeiffer says.

CSIRO's tools allow creators to index these segments, add descriptions "and we can integrate this into the web," she explains.

"The creator of the video uses the annotations ... You can put a hyperlink into one of these clips as well. As the clip is playing you can click and jump to other videos or other media," she says.

CSIRO started using an early version of the CMML authoring software last year to allow browsing and searching of the organisation's own online videos. It has created an archive with a series of "Australia Advances" reports and interviews with scientists. The archive is expected to go live this week as a demonstration of the concept.

To browse these videos, CMML-enabled media players for Mac OS and server tools for Linux computers are available to download from the site. CSIRO hopes to have Windows versions ready by the end of the year. Ultimately, perhaps in five years, Pfeiffer believes an appropriate player will be built into most browsers.

In order to be successful, it has to be open-source and comply with international standards, says Pfeiffer. CMML conventions have been submitted to international standards organisations. CSIRO has also submitted an extension to the URL format to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

A URL or website address can be comprised of several components. Fragment offsets, for example, indicated by the hash symbol (#), can be used to link to a specific place within a long document. This mechanism can be teamed with the SMPTE time coding for video - the same timing a VCR shows. Using these numbers, a web link can be created that specifies a particular moment during a clip.

CSIRO hopes to tempt libraries and media organisations - anyone managing a collection of sound and video - into adding CMML annotations to their clips. Home users may also be interested in using CMML annotations for their home videos, says Pfeiffer.

"I have lots of digital video of my family and my son. With this I could email my family in Europe and give them a link right into the best part of a particular video," she says.

"To do the annotations yourself at the moment you have to be a bit of a geek, as it is all command line tools. But we are working on a graphical one at the moment."

Greater integration of video on the web will add significant implications for broadband, as more people are enticed to view movies online.